Interview with Ted Chiang | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Ted Chiang

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98 pointsnreece59 comments

I'm so glad that this movie is getting Ted Chiang more exposure. He's one of the most interesting and creative science fiction authors out there, despite and unbelievably small output (he has literally published fifteen stories over almost 30 years, and picked up four Hugos, four Nebulas, and a ton of other prestigious awards.) Maybe this will finally motivate him to quit his day job and write more, or at least get more people reading his stuff.

As a writer, I have a sneaking suspicion that Ted Chiang writes a lot more than he publishes. You just don't get as good as he is without lots and lots of practice. I have a feeling there are a lot of projects he scraps that we never get to see, and many of them are probably pretty great.

Personally, I find him and his quality-over-quantity approach inspiring.

> Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted.

This seems to fit your theory.

100% agree. I loved his short stories (including the one this book depicts). This was my first foray into sci-fi (if you can call it that, strictly) and it was awesome.

A great short story Ted Chiang wrote that have some themes similar to Arrival (free will) is the one he wrote for Nature Futures:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a...

This is an awesomely elegant little short story.

"I can’t recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers, because it’s going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. Nowadays I work as a freelance writer, so I usually do contract technical writing part of the year and then I take time off and do fiction writing the rest of the year. It’s too difficult for me to do technical writing at the same time as fiction writing — they draw on the same parts of my brain. " - Ted Chiang

Can this be a blocking factor for coding side projects as well? What if companies offered a role where 11 months of the year, you do the company's work, and one whole month you get to make whatever you want? Or a project-based role that covers a year's expenses.

Oh, definitely. I've spent vastly less time on coding side projects since coding became a full-time job. Not that I don't still enjoy coding; I do. It's just that by the time I get home in the evening I'm pretty much coded out. Which kind of sucks, because I haven't found anything anywhere near as absorbing to replace it as a hobby.

Ted Chiang is incredible. My personal favorite by him is "The Great Silence". Touches on communication, the Fermi paradox and ecology from the point of view of a parrot named Alex - http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/ted-chiang/

Ooh, thanks. I thought I'd read everything he's put out, but I missed that one.

Nice, I had no idea Arrival was adapted from a Ted Chiang story. Maybe I'll have to check it out.

For those who aren't familiar with his work, I highly recommend Stories of Your Life and Others. It's perhaps the most amazing collection of SF short stories I've read. It's hard to describe it, but there's something about his work that makes it feel both simultaneously more real and more mind-bending than other SF fare. I think it's the combination of his completely outlandish premises (which I can't figure out how to describe without spoiling things) and completely matter-of-fact, mundane way he writes about them.

To elaborate, Arrival is based off of the story "Story of Your Life" from that collection.

I'm still sad they changed the name of the movie from Story of your Life at the last minute (from what I heard the title did not do well with the initial test viewers). Arrival is so much more generic, but it is doing well for the number of screens they put it on which is the most important factor.

The interviewer here rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like he had his own ideas about the things Chiang explores, and used much of the interview as a way to try to get Chiang to talk about those ideas, rather than talking about Chiang's own exploration of them.

Did anyone else get this sense?

I felt the same way, but ultimately decided it's a good attribute for an interviewer to have, even though it didn't work out this time.

A good interviewer should understand his interviewee's work, have ideas about it, and then use those ideas to probe for deeper insights than surface details like "who influences you as a writer?". But deep probes are a little risky -- you might not find anything in that direction.

In this case, more than one of the interviewer's probes was a little off-base, but -- to his credit -- he didn't pursue those questions too far after Chiang's responses came back somewhat tempered. Kudos for trying, and kudos for letting it go.

Finally, kudos to Chiang himself for being clear about how he views his work. When faced with an enthusiastic -- but incorrect -- interpretation of one's writing, some authors would just "go with the flow", hesitant to dampen their readers' enthusiasm (misguided as it might be). But Chiang gently shot down a few of the interviewer's ideas, ultimately strengthening the original meaning of his own work.

The greater the marketing hype before a film arrives in my town, the greater the inevitable disappointment. Perhaps Arrival is great, but imho the truly great ones don't invest in such a hype machine.

The "100% at rotten tomatoes" line in the commercials give me pause. I checked. It's at 95, not 100. I can see why. Scores do change, but it's just more evidence of heavy marketing. The best scifi, the really good stuff, doesn't hit a home run with reviewers immediately. I'm suspicious and so will probably go see this movie myself first rather than suggest a group of us go.

It's flawed, certainly, but I found it compelling. Took me quite a while through the credits before I could compose myself to leave.

Probably the best $5 I've spent in a long time (morning showing).

> The best scifi, the really good stuff, doesn't hit a home run with reviewers immediately.

Wait, so your expectations for the movie would be higher if the Rotten Tomatoes score was lower?

I pay more attention to the user rating than the critics rating, critics are either paid off, or what they like in a movie is different than most movie goers.

Hard to avoid spoilers this way, but the best way to consider critic reviews is to focus on the negative ones.

If a movie gets 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the negative reviews are all rather inane, you can be reasonably confident that it's actually a good movie. But when they start making valid points, you can be confident it's merely overhyped.

>> Wait, so your expectations for the movie would be higher if the Rotten Tomatoes score was lower?

Yes. A good movie should be hated by certain reviewers. There are a great many reviewers with radically different tastes than mine. The chances of us all agreeing about a movie are slim. So when I see "100%" I am suspicious.

It's very good, I'd recommend seeing it. Avoid spoilers if you can.

The cinematography is gorgeous and the whole movie just feels extremely tight and well put together with nothing extraneous. Its small flaws are overshadowed by just how good it is. HN commenters just like to shit on things as soon as they're popular to feel smart.

>> Avoid spoilers if you can.

That's another red flag for me. The great scifi remains watchable over and over. Knowing the plot, not being surprised, should not take much away from a properly good movie. When people tell me not to read spoilers they are suggesting to me that the film is considerably less watchable without the surprises.

True be told, pretty much every "giant ships" scifi follows the predictable path. We see the ships, we get scared. Some government types then want to nuke them while a band of heros (a couple government types + an emotionally-damaged scientist + the human interest character) tries to convince everyone to calm down and see the good in the aliens (Godzilla 2015). Or the opposite, where the scientist is the one screaming danger (Independence Day). The only surprise is whether or not the world actually ends ... but knowing that fact in advance doesn't take much from a good movie. We knew that the aliens would eventually die (it was a War of the Worlds remake) and we knew that Godzilla would win. They remain as watchable the second or tenth time you see them.

While the Hollywood-added differences from Chiang's story are pretty much just as you described, there is also a plot arc retained from the original that's different from this.

I'd gladly rewatch it, but is it really so hard to imagine that a surprising plot is worth being unspoiled?

You're trying awfully hard to dislike a movie you haven't seen.

>> You're trying awfully hard to dislike a movie you haven't seen.

I am. I do try hard. I've been burnt by too many movies. If am only going to see one in a given month (at the theatre) I don't want to waste that opportunity. I don't think I am alone in heavily criticizing how a movie is promoted as part of the decision. One of the reasons I went to DrStrange was that the movie had not been so heavily promoted. It's a standard superhero movie, but the lack of exaggerated claims gave me confidence.

The last time I allowed someone else to take me to a "critically acclaimed" movie I ended up cringing through Twelve Years a Slave. Or Contact, which I only sat through because I was with people. If Arrival is anything like Contact I want to know that in advance.

I'm pretty well disconnected from mass media, but was Arrival really more hyped than Dr. Strange? I hadn't even heard of Arrival until it, well, arrived.

Anyway, speaking as someone who saw it for $5, I'd pay thrice that to see it again (and probably will). I found it much more compelling than Dr. Strange, which I might watch again someday on Netflix.

More that I think about it, makes sense there'd be more of an advertising push for a movie that's rather difficult to describe, even difficult to understand, vs "hey another Marvel Universe film of course you're going to go see it".

Definitely doesn't seem fair to complain that Arrival needed to be promoted to make money. Look at what happened to "Iron Giant": fantastic film, completely underwhelming box office because WB had no idea how to market it.

Considering Arrival only got something like half as many screens no it was not nearly as hyped. Frankly I don't think the distributor understood what they had their hands on.

Different areas, different media roll outs. DrStrange was barely mentioned on TV in my area. I think I saw one commercial. But Arrival seemed to have a spot during every break last night.

You're wrong about this one but I guess that's your loss. It's a fantastic adaptation and takes what is already a great story and uses the full arsenal of film making to turn it into something truly moving.

I think the marketing/hype is just a studio decision - they got an amazing film with known stars for a cut price $47 million so it's worth a punt on marketing to make it a big release.

Surely there's a difference between "hyped by many reviewers and related journalism" and "hyped by McDonald's and 7-11 tie-ins"

I'm very curious about what you consider to be "the best scifi, the really good stuff". Could you name some examples?

Very few decent SF scripts go into production, even fewer with such amazing talent on board (Villeneuve, Johannsson, Adams) etc.

Arrival is not just one of the best SF films this year, it's one of the best films this year.

Villeneuve and Johannsson weren't handed Bladerunner 2 for no good reason :)

I'd draw a line between the good scifi and the good theatre movies. There is some great scifi out there that isn't for general consumption in theatres. I'd call Akira (1988) one of the greats, but not the sort of thing I would see in a theater with a mixed group of friends.

On the other hand, I didn;t like the Matrix movies much but would have to agree that were fun in theatres. Some people found them great, but they haven't aged well imho. I saw the original Jurassic Park probably 10 times in theatres. That was a great scifi theatre movie. If it came out today I would recommend it to my friends.

I truly enjoyed the movie Arrival! Highly recommended.

The least amount of "its a movie" was required of any movie I have seen in years. I did not see where it was going, and I was thrilled when it got there.

Ted Chiang is cool. But I think "Story of your life" isn't his best work. If you're going to read one story by Chiang, a good one is "Liking what you see": http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/liking.html

Yes, that's probably my fave too, and the least fantastical of his.

I saw Arrival last night, and was very struck by the fact that despite having read and loved Stories of Your Life and Others, I couldn't remember anything of the plot.

That's interesting, because Chiang himself doesn't view "Liking What You See" to be his best work. In fact, he turned down a Hugo nomination for it, "on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted".[1]

Personally, I think Story of Your Life is a master work. I found the strange writing structure annoying at first, and then right at the end of the story you get an "ah-ha" moment that changes everything. What I thought was awkward writing turned out to be a masterful illustration about a theory of consciousness. I was floored by Chiang's ambition to even write such a story.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang

I was a bit depressed that I didn't get to experience that revelation while reading the story, but getting to experience it while watching the movie is fair recompense.

(2014); the interview was conducted in 2010 and published here in 2014.

Earlier HN thread with a lot of Arrival discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364

I have high hopes for this movie, but I don't enjoy Ted Chiang's writing. It is too clever, the dialog is terrible, and there is an underlying smugness - as if the writer is laughing about his poor, dumb characters and their ignorance.

Can you give an example of the too-clever writing and underlying smugness?

I haven't felt that way, but I have only read "Story of your life" and "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", so my sample size is pretty small.

I didn't know him until now. I will definitely check out his short stories.

I also love Ken Lu, his book "The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories" is one of the best collection of short stories I have read.

Ken Liu actually wrote a response to one of Ted Chiang's stories.

http://kenliu.name/stories/single-bit-error/ is a response/exploration of the same world and ideas as Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God", in Stories of Your Life and Others.

I recommend reading the Chiang story first.

Wow, thank you.

For a guy with as many awards as him I am surprised he needs a second job. He doesn't write a lot, but given his quality I am surprised someone hasn't paid him to just write.

Short fiction does not pay good money, and that I know of he doesn't publish novels which is where it is POSSIBLE to make a decent to great wage (but quality is no guarantee of making good money).

I’ve just finished reading “The story of your life” the other day and I can’t say I’m impressed. Based on the comments I’ve read about the movie I expected it to be mind boggling. The author claims that knowing the future affects free will but he doesn’t bother explaining how could anyone know the future or why would there be only one – quantum mechanics for example states that there could be countless futures/universes. For my standards the story is too swallow. I’m used to reading hard sci-fi where usually authors go into excessive detail to describe their worlds. Chiang doesn’t do that. He just presents a theory and lets it linger in your mind. It reads more like philosophy rather than sci-fi.

I found it to be a story where the payoff takes a little while to percolate. It did not hit me immediately - I even had to search around for an explanation. It is intentionally left a bit open, and the specific "scientific" details are left up to your imagination, beyond the linguistics work. Once it hit me, though, I slowly became more and more impressed.

Your appraisal's right, his work is more philosophical/speculative than "hard" SF. But I don't see a problem with that. There's room for both in science fiction. If you don't particularly prefer the spec-fic stuff, there's nothing wrong with that either. It depends on what you see the purpose of scifi as being: Is it to explore cool tech/science we can't explore in reality yet, or is it to use tech/science to ask questions we can't answer in reality yet?

Sure it's both and a gazillion other things. But here's the thing, even as a philosophical theme I don't find it presented very well. Why for example can't you act on free will? Who's stopping you? The future? And who's enforcing it?

He could for example go down the path of the simulation hypothesis which also renders free will irrelevant. But he didn't. I don't know, perhaps after a while it will hit but right now I can't really see the greatness in the scenario. I don't mean to dismiss it, just saying so to open a conversation.

You are saying this free will stuff because you are conditioned to believe in free will. Someone who knew that there was only one future would find the idea of free will to be like some kind of fairy tale -- the lack of it doesn't require any more explanation than the lack of Santa Claus.

In our current non-fictional universe, where we don't know if there is free will, then if you want to believe in it, maybe the burden of proof is on you to explain how it would even be possible given what we know of the universe.

So I am not sure why you think a fiction author is failing at is job by not explaining the mechanism by which there is not free will.

Astonishingly hard to imagine how any such exploration would not have diminished the story. This is a woman narrating an extraordinary experience and a relationship with her daughter, not a physicist giving a lecture on the structure of the universe.

His works are definitely more philosophical, though I think that's always been an important part of sci-fi; Asimov never explained how a positronic brain worked, just explored the possibilities of a hypothetical world. Chiang takes philosophical writing right up to the point of Jorge Luis Borges, and if that's not your thing, that's reasonable. If you are looking for more world-building and detail, though, I do recommend his "Tower of Babylon," which describes the engineering challenges of building the Biblical Tower of Babel, assuming that the flat-Earth, solid sky model of Biblical cosmology was really true.

I don't think it's nearly as good as "Understand" or "Exhalation" or "Hell is the Absence of God" (all discussed in OP). Like "Life Cycle of Software Objects", it seems seriously overrated. But "Story of Your Life" is definitely one of the more confusing stories and I had to read it at least twice before I thought I understood what sort of Chiang-style message Chiang was going for.

What I take him as suggesting is not that the aliens really are tapping into quantum woo to see the future (this is what inferior SF authors might do and maybe have in the movie which I haven't seen), any more than light rays see into the future in order to take the shortest path, but doing something more like Watts's _Blindsight_ in trying to explore different kinds of minds: that given the reversibility of the laws of physics and the arrow of time, there is no logical or privileged reason to have a conscious experience of the universe as time unfolding sequentially and computationally according to a program computing 1 planck-second at a time, rather than as an Einsteinian 4D block universe in which the block universe is the optimal path between boundary conditions and everything unfolds as it must and already has. This is similar to points Drescher makes in _Good and Real_: a brain could try to understand the universe by taking the present and extrapolating forward but it also takes the present and extrapolate backward. You can 'remember' the future as easily as the past.

The aliens could be doing this, and it is as valid a way of cognition as anything else. And then the drama comes from the protagonist slowly adopting this way of thinking herself to come to terms with her grief over her daughter's death by adopting a timeless Lagrangian way of thinking and explaining it to the reader who is still trapped in the algorithmic perspective.

Understand is in development by the same writer

Yes yes yes. We read "Story of Your Life" in my Sci-fi reading club, and several people came away with the misunderstanding that the aliens could see the future or something like that. But your interpretation is correct (IMHO). Chiang was making a point about the subjective nature of consciousness, or at least one aspect of it.

I think in this case the film works better than the story. It's not one of my favourites of Chiang's but the impact & consequences of Louise learning the heptapod language is far greater on film than it is in prose.

Having read the short story after seeing the film, I agree. The story is enjoyable, but the film is powerful.

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